Handshake
San Francisco, CA, USA
Handshake AI Research Intern, Summer 2026
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About the Role
Handshake AI builds the data engines that power the next generation of large language models. Our research team works at the intersection of cutting-edge model post-training, rigorous evaluation, and data efficiency. Join us for a focused Summer 2026 internship where your work can ship directly into our production stack and become a publishable research contribution. To start between May and June 2026.
Projects You Could Tackle
- LLM Post-Training: Novel RLHF / GRPO pipelines, instruction-following refinements, reasoning-trace supervision.
- LLM Evaluation: New multilingual, long-horizon, or domain-specific benchmarks; automatic vs. human preference studies; robustness diagnostics.
- Data Efficiency: Active-learning loops, data value estimation, synthetic data generation, and low-resource fine-tuning strategies.
Each intern owns a scoped research project, mentored by a senior scientist, with the explicit goal of an archive-ready manuscript or top-tier conference submission.
Desired Capabilities
- Current PhD student in CS, ML, NLP, or related field.
- Publication track record at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, etc.).
- Hands-on experience training and experimenting with LLMs (e.g., PyTorch, JAX, DeepSpeed, distributed training stacks).
- Strong empirical rigor and a passion for open-ended AI questions.
Extra Credit
- Prior work on RLHF, evaluation tooling, or data selection methods.
- Contributions to open-source LLM frameworks.
- Public speaking or teaching experience (we often host internal reading groups).